National and international public awareness about sexual attacks in Egypt more or less started October 24, 2006, during the Muslim feast of Eid, when online activists posted videos of gangs of men rampaged through downtown Cairo, assaulting any woman who came near them, whether veiled or not.

Since this accident, Egypt is deploying additional police to a number of locations every year in order to combat any possible outbreaks of mass sexual attacks during these holidays.

NOTE: Every Eid holiday since the October 2006 incident has seen a massive number of attacks against women, in 2007 and beyond.

Noha Rushdi, a 27-year-old filmmaker, has been sexually assaulted, by 28-year-old van driver Sharif Gomaa as he drove alongside her, grapping her breasts so forcefully she had to fell. Instead of keeping silence, Noha gave a great interview with the weekly Egyptian independent Al-Yom Al-Saba’a and managed to drag him into the police station.

The man was sentenced to three years in prison under the current sexual harassment laws and fined nearly $900.

The “butcher” of Maadi – an upscale Cairo suburb – was sentenced to 45 years in prison on Tuesday in a rare display of punishment over crimes against women in Egypt. According to reports, Mohamed El Sayyed received the sentence after prosecutors argued successfully that he had sexually assaulted at least 9 women in the area, which earned him the nickname in the Maadi area where a majority of his attacks took place.

The Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights (ECWR) has launched a new campaign as part of their “Making Our Streets Safer for Everyone” that uses a games booklet to fight sexual harassment against children. The new campaign, titled “Very Important” aims to combat rising sexual harassment toward children in the country.

When women walk the streets of Cairo, the near constant verbal and physical attacks take its toll. For Mona Hanafi el-Siofi it was simply too much, so she gathered some friends and decided they needed to take some action. She decided that one way of bringing attention to this growing problem in the country was to hand out pamphlets to perpetrators that listed a series of statements and questions.

A new project aimed at combating sexual harassment on the streets of Cairo will soon be launched. The project, called HarassMap, aims to create a map of the ‘hotspots’ of harassment in Cairo – that is, the places where harassment most frequently occurs.

Salma Hayek told a symposium in Cairo that she was sexually harassed in Egypt when she was visiting the country when she was only 17-years-old. Her comments are likely to strike home for the millions of Egyptian women who complain daily of their poor treatment on Egyptian streets.

Egyptian human rights and legal activists for women’s rights called on the Egyptian government to issue severe penalties and the criminalization of sexual harassment of women in the street and in the workplace.

They demanded that the labor and penal codes should include more “visible and deterrent penalties to whomever harasses a woman,” expressing their dissatisfaction with the continued worsening of the phenomenon of sexual harassment of girls and women in public parks and streets during holidays.

Egyptian member of Parliament Georgette Kellini of the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP), submitted a proposal of a draft law to address sexual harassment through the amendment of the Penal Code to the Egyptian Parliament last week.

The move is being welcomed by Egyptian women’s activists, who have long called on the government to take a more proactive stance on the rising problem of sexual harassment in the country.

Reem is a 21-year-old Egyptian woman who recently graduated from university and is looking forward to the future. Like the vast majority of women in Egypt, she was the victim of a sexual assault that took place in Egypt’s many public spaces: on the bus.

She told Bikya Masr the story of the incident, and more shockingly, what the police did – rather did not do – in response.

ECWR launched a public campaign with the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), in cooperation with Cairo University and a number of partners of research centers, civil society organizations and governmental and UN institutions to develop and enhance women’s status in Egypt through a world free of violence.

CBS US correspondent Lara Logan was sexually assaultet last Friday in Egypt’s Tahrir Square in the midst of celebrations at the ousting of Hosni Mubarak. It had happened before, during the same revolution. The only difference was Ms. Logan was a foreigner.

The sexual assaults against CBS US correspondent Lara Logan sheds light again on the problem of sexual violence and the denial of the problem in Egyptian society, being discussed in the following articles.

In a new indication that sexual violence is not restricted to how one dresses in Egypt, a fully-veiled woman was kidnapped and gang-raped for an entire day in Giza. Police arrested five men and have charged them with kidnapping, rape and robbery.

An anti-sexual harassment page on Facebook launched an invitation to Egyptian women to go out during Eid, the holiday that follows the month of Ramadan, without worry of being harassed as this is the time of year where sexual harassment intensifies.

In the same month, Harassmap, a Cairo-based website that monitors and archives all acts of sexual harassment in the greater Cairo area, launched a new SMS short code system aid for reporting sexual harassment.

An Egyptian teenager was killed in the city of Mansoura, in the Nile Delta region, on Wednesday after sexually harassing two girls in a public park. The victim, a 16 year-old student, had harrassed two young girls while they were on a walk in a public park, using an electric tazer, which made the girls scream in horror.

Award-winning Egyptian columnist Mona el-Tahawy has recounted on her personal Twitter account the sexual assault at the hands of the Egyptian police after she was detained for nearly 12 hours on Thursday morning in Cairo.

After Caroline Sinz, a French reporter for public TV station France 3, became the third women sexual assaulted while reporting from Egypt’s Tahrir Square on Thursday, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) advised the media on Thursday night that “there is no other solution” but to hold off on sending female journalists.

At least four women are reportedly attacked by mobs of men in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, having their clothes ripped from them and assaulted in horrific fashion. One Arab-American woman spoke out to Bikyamasr.com on the attack.

Activists on Twitter condemned the attacks, demanding the demonstrators take action to end assaults against women.